He's the man behind Descendants, High School Musical, Hocus Pocus, and Newsies, but Kenny Ortega's journey to becoming a Disney Legend started long before Mickey Mouse called. This is the story of the creative force Disney keeps turning to when they need to remind audiences why they fell in love with Disney magic.
From starting out as a dancer in touring productions of Hair to choreographing music videos for Madonna and Elton John, stadium tours for Michael Jackson, and the iconic "Twist and Shout" sequence in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Kenny Ortega was shaping pop culture for a decade before Disney ever picked up the phone. When they finally did in 1988, it kicked off a 30-year partnership that would define childhoods for millions.
What makes Ortega different is that he was never just a company man. He brought rock tours, Olympic ceremonies, and fountain choreography from the Vegas strip into everything he made for Disney.
Subscribe on YouTube for more Disney connections:
https://www.youtube.com/@SynergyLovesCompany?sub_confirmation=1
Podcast:
Listen to Synergy Loves Company → https://synergylovescompany.com
Support the Show:
Shop official Synergy Loves Company merch → https://shop.synergylovescompany.com
Affiliate Disclosure: Some links above may be affiliate links. If you click and purchase, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting the channel!
Connect with Me:
Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/synergylovescompany
Bluesky → https://bsky.app/profile/erichsynergy.bsky.social
Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/synergylovescompany
This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
00:00 --> 21:31 In 1986, Ferris Bueller took a day off of school and borrowed his friend Cameron's dad's car to live it up all around the city of Chicago. He went to a Cubs game, he took on the persona of Abe Froman the Sausage King, and he led the most epic dance sequence ever when he took over a parade float in downtown and turned the whole city into a big musical number with thousands of people dancing in the streets to Twist and Shout and one of the most joyful moments of 1980s cinema. The movie is iconic, and it's one of those high school teen movies made by John Hughes that defined '80s cinema. And the guy who choreographed that sequence is also the guy who directed High School Musical and Descendants for Disney. Kenny Ortega has been all over pop culture since the late '70s. He's choreographed music videos, directed TV and movies, worked with Michael Jackson in some of the biggest live performances in the world. He doesn't always work with Disney, but when he does, it's career-defining for him and era-defining for Disney. Hey, this is Synergy Loves Company, where we explore how Disney connects to everything. I'm Eric, and today we're taking a look at Kenny Ortega, the guy Disney keeps calling back every time they need someone remind audiences why they fell in love with Disney magic in the first place. Kenny Ortega grew up in Palo Alto, California, and from the beginning, it was always music, always movement. He started his career as a performer doing touring productions of shows like Oliver! and Hair! And this was great because he was doing the work he wanted to be doing. But one night, he's taking a break from the stage to unwind, and he's at this club in San Francisco dancing, which he's great at, and he catches catches the eye of a band called The Tubes. And if you're not familiar with them, The Tubes were this art rock band, kind of theatrical and unique and totally ahead of their time. They were like hard rock and glam and kind of punk rock, but also kind of pop, and they used satire in their performances. But that's not quite it either. Just go check them out. Anyway, they created this spectacle on stage, mixing rock music with live theater in their performances, but They were musicians and they didn't have like that dance stage performance experience, and they needed someone who could help them crack the code and figure all that out. Make a really solid stage performance to go along with the music they were making. So when they saw Kenny Ortega, they knew they wanted him to join their crew. And when the Tubes offered Kenny the job, he had actually just been offered the lead role in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar. That show would be a sure bet, but this thing with the Tubes, Was so much more interesting. So in 1975, he turned down Jesus Christ Superstar to go on the road with the Tubes instead, and he stayed with them for years. And that risk paid off. And one of the ways it paid off for Kenny Ortega is that the Tubes got asked to work on a 1980 movie with Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly, and Kenny gets asked to help choreograph the movie. Now Xanadu is a roller disco. fantasy fever dream of a movie starring Olivia Newton-John. Even though it was kind of a flop when it was first released, it has a major cult following, and it spawned a more recent Broadway musical. And the people who love it absolutely love it. I love it. It had tons of musical artists doing different musical genres and performances, and it feels like a story made of chopped-up music videos, even though it came out before the launch of MTV. It was ahead of its time in that way. Xanadu blends live-action sequences with full animated scenes, and those animated scenes were handled by Disney animation defector Don Bluth, who later brought us movies like The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and The Land Before Time. So already, this one movie is touching multiple corners of the entertainment world that Kenny would spend his career in. But the most important thing that happens on Xanadu is that Kenny meets Gene Kelly. Gene Kelly was the guy who dances in movies. He'd been doing it his whole career, and he did it well. And Gene Kelly takes Kenny Ortega under his wing. Kenny had this, like, raw instinct and energy that could make the whole room feel alive, but he didn't yet know how to do choreography specifically for the camera. The stage, he had that covered. It was great. Gene Kelly had spent decades, his whole career, dancing on camera and figuring out what works best. So he mentored Kenny Ortega and gave him a tremendous amount of creative and technical knowledge, specifically for working with dance on camera. The camera choreography skills he got from Gene Kelly launched his next chapter. MTV, like we said, took off like wildfire, and Kenny directed and choreographed music videos for Madonna, Olivia Newton-John, The Tubes, Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, like everyone who was making music videos in the '80s, they wanted Kenny to direct them. The ripple effect of MTV in the '80s also meant that movies aimed at the teen demographic wanted the same music video sensibilities. Dance movies and teen movies were big business, and Kenny Ortega got the choreography work on those too. St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and then Dirty Dancing. in 1987, which earns over $200 million worldwide on a $5 million budget. And by the end of the 1980s, Kenny Ortega is the person that Hollywood calls when they need a moviegoing audience to feel something with a big production number. So of course Disney notices. If something is hot in Hollywood in the late '80s, Michael Eisner wants it for Disney. So in 1988, they bring Kenny in choreograph 2 television specials, Mickey's 60th Birthday and Totally Minnie. And we gotta talk about Totally Minnie for a second because it's totally '80s and it's totally awesome. And if you haven't seen it before, I'll leave a link down below. It's this full variety special built around relaunching Minnie Mouse's image for the late '80s. It stars Robert Carradine and Suzanne Somers with musical performances and of course choreographed dance numbers woven all the way through. Minnie Mouse and Elton John sing Don't Go Breaking My Heart. This is Disney trying to make Minnie feel current, trying to plug their most classic characters directly into the '80s pop MTV moment. And Kenny brought the MTV music energy he'd been working with ever since Xanadu, and it worked. And it showed Disney everything they needed to know about what this guy could do for them. Before they go big with Kenny Ortega though, there's this one TV project that almost nobody remembers, and we gotta talk about it. In 1990, Kenny Ortega directs and choreographs episodes of a Touchstone Television show called Hull High. He even helped write the theme song. It airs on NBC, and it's a musical teen comedy series set at a high school, and every single episode has full original musical numbers built right into the story. Characters just break into song They sing to song in the hallways. It's like they're bopping to the top. There's a rap group that comments on the plot like a Greek chorus. The cast is young, the energy is high, and the whole concept is built around that idea that music is how these kids process their lives. That might sound familiar. Whole High is a High School Musical series 15 years before we even got to meet Troy and Gabriella. It had the same DNA, though, and loosely the same premise. But it only ran for 6 episodes on NBC before they pulled the plug, and 3 more finished episodes never got to see the light of day. But I think Kenny learned something from it. He learned what a TV budget could and couldn't do, and how to build a musical world inside a school when you don't have unlimited resources. So TV's one thing, but there's a different problem Disney wants Kenny Ortega to help solve. '90s, the Disney Animation Renaissance is officially underway, but the live-action side, the Disney-branded family films, have pretty much gone quiet. The studio was still making movies, live-action movies, under the Touchstone Pictures label, but it was edgier stuff, trying to be more aimed towards adults, although it could be argued that a lot of it was family fare also. And all that Touchstone stuff was working great, but what wasn't happening was a return to the kind of live-action Disney that families actually grew up on. The Mary Poppins era, the Hayley Mills and Kurt Russell films from the '60s. Disney needed to bring back the Disney family film for the Disney Decade. In 1992, Disney gave Kenny Ortega his first feature film as a director, Newsies. It's this full sung-through musical about a group of newsboy strikers in 1899 New York, it is Disney swinging as hard as they possibly can at a return to live-action musicals like Mary Poppins. Andrew Laszlo, the director of photography on the film, noted that even the camera moves were choreographed because that's how Kenny worked. That's that Gene Kelly camera choreography influence right there. The movie opens up and the box office is a little rough. It earns less than $3 million in the theaters against its $15 million budget. Not great. Similar to Xanadu though, the fans kept this one alive. Kids discovered Newsies on home video and on the Disney Channel and held on to it for years. Eventually that devoted cult following gets loud enough and Disney adapted Newsies into a full Broadway stage production for Disney on Broadway. The real ones always knew what Kenny was on to with Newsies. And because he already started working on it when Newsies was still in production, Disney gives Kenny another live-action shot for a Walt Disney Pictures family film with 1993's Hocus Pocus. And I love it. Hocus Pocus is a Halloween comedy with Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker as resurrected witches through modern Salem, Massachusetts. Completely different tone than Newsies. Only a little bit of musical flair, but pure comedic spectacle. It does all right, but again, it underperforms at the box office. And it also becomes a cult classic. And today we're still watching it every October. Hocus Pocus has a presence at Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, and it got a super successful sequel on Disney+, and it's still pulling new audiences in decades later. So technically, Kenny Ortega got 2 swings with Disney live-action 2 action films and 2 misses, but Disney family films, even in Walt's day, they were those middle-of-the-road movies for the whole family. Their real power was in the memory and the sharing with future generations. Both of Kenny's Disney movies did this big time for the VHS generation, and overall, the Disney family film came back strong in the '90s. So let's let those movies sit and gain their cult following while we take a look at what else Kenny Ortega was up to at the time. Kenny still always kept working on producing big live stage shows, concert tours for acts like KISS and Cher and Disney legend Danny Elfman's Oingo Boingo. And then the King of Pop calls up Kenny Ortega. At this point, I am contractually obligated to remind you of how much of a Disney fan Michael Jackson was. You could watch the video I made about it here. But anyways, Kenny Ortega becomes Michael Jackson's creative partner and concert director for the Dangerous World Tour in 1992 and 1993. Then he comes back for the HIStory World Tour in 1996. These are big theatrical performances— Michael Jackson, musicians, backup dancers, audio, video, lighting extravaganzas. And if Kenny is the guy who could handle an international Michael Jackson tour, he's the guy for the global stage. And in 1996, he choreographs the opening ceremony to the Atlanta Summer Olympics. Then in 2002, Salt Lake City's Winter Olympics opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies get Kenny for the job, which he wins Emmy Awards for. He does Super Bowl halftime shows. These are all televised live performances, and he has to mix the skills, choreograph for screen and the stage at the same time. And then Steve Wynn calls him in Las Vegas to choreograph the fountains for the grand opening of the Bellagio Hotel, and it's like the most visited public attraction in the entire city when it opens. And the show still runs today. Kenny Ortega is the guy who knows movement. He can choreograph musicians and actors and inanimate objects like fountains, really anything. And we gotta talk about the massive movement he created for Disney. Through the late '90s and into the early 2000s, the Disney Channel had been battling Nickelodeon for the tween demographic. And Nickelodeon was usually winning. Nick had the shows, the characters, the cultural gravity with the kids from ages 8 to 14. It was the channel to watch. Disney Channel was producing original movies and series, and there were hits for sure, but nothing was breaking through and sticking the way that Disney needed. Nickelodeon was still on top. Disney Channel needed something big, and Kenny Ortega knows big production. So Disney brings him on board again to direct a 2006 Disney Channel original movie called High School Musical. It's the story of a basketball star and the theater girl he has a crush on, and they want to audition for the high school musical together. And all their friends try telling them that they shouldn't. They try to talk them out of it. They don't— stay in your lane. It's about breaking down that, like, high school politics. It's— It only had a modest budget, like a made-for-TV budget. It's just It's another Disney Channel original movie, just a story and a bunch of songs, but it also seems kind of special. And Kenny Ortega treats it like every other project he would work on, no matter how big or small. Every camera angle is looked at through his choreographer's perspective first. Every musical number is built to carry that emotional weight, and Kenny Ortega is invested in what the movie he is saying to kids. The message that you don't have to stay in the box that other people built around you. He's spoken about this directly, about how much bullying pushes kids away from new ideas that they have about themselves and what they want to do, and about wanting young people to find their own voice regardless of outside pressures. High School Musical premieres and it's the biggest dang thing that the Disney Channel has ever seen. The soundtrack becomes the first made-for-TV movie soundtrack in history to reach number 1 on the Billboard charts, and the network viewership numbers shatter all sorts of records. Eat that, Nickelodeon. Zac Efron, who Kenny cast in that lead role, launches into a career that takes him well beyond Disney, and suddenly every tween in America is paying attention to the Disney Channel again. High School Musical 2 follows in 2007 and goes even bigger. Then it's too big for cable television, And High School Musical 3: Senior Year moves the whole thing into the movie theaters. High School Musical launched careers, it sold out concert tours that Kenny Ortega directed, it did Disney on Ice, and it became a whole generation's childhood. Kenny Ortega's role in it all gets recognized by the fans. He shows up as an animated version of himself in a Go Figure musical episode of Phineas and Ferb. At this point, he is a Disney Channel legend. He produces the concert tour of Hannah Montana. So Disney, of course, keeps him around. And in 2015, he comes back to the Disney Channel as executive producer, director, and choreographer for Descendants. It's another singing, dancing Disney Channel original movie, just like High School Musical. But this one has the full force of Disney IP behind it. It's about the teenage children of Disney's villains: Maleficent's daughter Mal, the Evil Queen's daughter Evie, Jafar's kid Jay, and Cruella de Vil's son Carlos. All of them shipped off to a prep school together in Auradon, where the Disney heroes' kids go. They're all trying to figure out who they are when the whole world expects them to be their parents. It's similar to what resonated with High School Musical. The characters need to cut their own path and not get boxed in by societal expectations. But this time, Disney's own mythology, its own canon, fuels the story. And once again, Kenny Ortega builds a full musical experience around it with every tool in that toolkit he's developed over his career. Descendants premieres to record numbers for the Disney Channel. 2 sequels follow. The franchise keeps going even after the heartbreaking loss of Cameron Boyce, who played Carlos. And as those characters aged out of the franchise, it still keeps going with the Rise of Red series that had just dropped its newest installment this year. Descendants has been around for over a decade. The audience that grew up with these movies has held on to them in the same way that an earlier generation held on to New and Hocus Pocus. We used to rewind and replay our VHS tapes. The kids today just play it again on Disney Plus, but it's kind of the same idea. High School Musical and Descendants are the 2 biggest Disney Channel franchises in the modern era, really the biggest Disney Channel franchises ever, and both of them were made under the direction of Kenny Ortega. Disney kept calling him back because he was never just a company guy. He always brought something from outside of of the Disney Company. Rock tours, halftime shows, music videos, even fountain choreography, although I don't know if they actually used that part of it. But Disney knew he could push those skills into something that families could share together. He understands the magic that makes Disney work, and that's why in 2019 they officially made him a Disney Legend. And I would consider you a Synergy Loves Company Legend if you tell all your Disney friends about this show. And if you want to make sure So that you don't miss any more of these connections to Disney, you could do me a favor and click that like button and then subscribe to the channel. Did you check out the video I did on Disney shared universes like Descendants? Like all sorts of Disney characters living in the same world? You could watch it next. And remember to keep discovering the magic in everything.